


Lantern

by aquandrian



Category: The Grapes Of Wrath (movie)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-02
Updated: 2007-04-02
Packaged: 2018-04-28 22:36:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5108123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquandrian/pseuds/aquandrian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So what happened to Tom Joad after he disappeared into the dark?</p><p>Disclaimer: Tom Joad belongs to John Steinbeck. Henry Fonda belongs to hisself. Damnit.</p><p>Originally posted at http://aquandrian.livejournal.com/493232.html</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lantern

1.  
There was once a boy. A boy just crossed into the tender scarred hard world of men but still with a boy's defiant romantic heart.

He crossed her path in the darkness of a moonless night, just her single lantern to light the way from outhouse to back porch. She's a gawkish troubled bag of bones and he is a stifled groan in the shadows.

Too young to know any better, she hides him in the barn, giddy on the danger and still touched every now and then by the dark grimness of their reality. His reality in the raw crinkled scar by his ice bright eyes. His ankle is twisted but he doesn't ask for the help she offers. He says very little, watches her from under the brim of a dirty cloth cap, watches from those wary eyes with all the darkness of the world behind their arresting brightness.

She's never seen eyes so clear and cold. They seem to pierce the world and yet she's not afraid when they light on her. She binds his ankle and smuggles him water and bread while her father slumps drunken by the pot bellied stove. And this boy turned man watches her risk her life for a wordless stranger. She doesn't understand either but perhaps this is all the romance her life will offer.

Sixteen and a bag of bones with masses of matted brown hair and freckles across her nose, she brings him a blanket at the dark of night and his eyes are strangely quizzical in the pool of light when he puts his hand on hers.

He thanks her only once. And he sounds just as young, just as old as she feels. His dark hair smudges across a high forehead, there's a peculiar beauty about the bones and shapes of his face. She thinks he looks like a film star all rumpled and dirty, bedded down in the hay with a Californian winter prickling at the smeared barn window.

She is sixteen and recklessly in love with romance, defiant of the grim confined path laid out before her. So she leans in on a jerk of heartstopping panic and pushes her mouth against his. Just for that split muddled second, he freezes and she tears away, horrified at herself and sick sure of rejection.

She runs back to the house and the next morning he's gone. The dark lantern sits by the folded blanket, witness to nothing.

 

2.  
He blocks out the sun, tall and lean and still a little awkward. She shades her eyes as she gets to her feet, dirt falling from the hem of her skirt.

All he asks is a drink of water. And she in her clean kitchen with a house emptied of aunts and young cousins, becomes a cliche. Her father used to grow oranges and is now buried beneath those trees. He never liked being a farmer but found no other choice. Twenty-four and unmarried still, she has a body of slight curves and uptilted green eyes. She knows enough to meet and hold the frost blue attention but still her heart hammers when he sets down the glass and touches his hand tentatively to her upper arm.

Fine cut lips never touch hers. He takes her on the narrow cot bed in the corner of the kitchen, his hair falling across his forehead in a straight vulnerable lick of almost black. The scar by his eyes is near silver in the sunlight. He hurts her but doesn't mean to, that much is clear. Sweat and the unsatisfying snatch of skin between dislodged clothing, it is a matter of an age and a few minutes. He smells of dust and oranges and the faintest whiff of river. She gasps with his hand on her tender breast, shudders with the push of his cock into her, and it's nothing and everything like she'd imagined.

His eyes flare with electric brightness.

 

3.  
Her children are just put to bed and she's sitting alone, braiding her hair when the tap sounds on the window pane. Badly frightened, she recoils but has already seen the pale face under the cloth cap that ducks out of sight.

There are riots and rebellions all over the state, dark talk of political menace and the American dream threatened by foreign talk of unnatural things. She doesn't know names or places or reasons but it's enough that he needs only dark and quiet, a night's refuge. Would she have agreed if her husband was home that night?

Strange slips of fate that allow her to secret the tall limping man in the cellar. He'll take no liquor and eat nothing though he's rake thin and strangely tense, like all his flesh has pulled in tight and protectively close to the bones of him. She watches him drink a little soup by the flicker of a stormlight. Here she is a comfortably plump woman, a wife and mother kept in relative ease by a lucky if lazy husband given to gambling in the next town. And she looks at a man worn thin and sharp by moving on the edges of a world she barely knows.

He nods his thanks, tells her tersely that the front door needs fixing. He could have quite easily forced the lock, forced his way in. Untroubled, she nods and leaves him to sleep rolled up in a thin blanket on the hard packed floor. He would take no bedding.

At the darkest point of night, a hoarse scream cuts the silence. She bolts upright in terror, is halfway out of bed with thoughts only of the children. But it's neither of her boys and she soothes them with talk of a stray cat. This is the pretext she uses to steal down to the cellar and turn up the stormlight to see staring horror in the palest blue eyes. He's out of the blanket, wedged into the farthest corner, a trapped catatonic animal transfixed by the spectre of memory or death. She daren't touch him, wary of the clenched fists, the violence flashing off him.

He's completely asleep.

So all she does is talk. Absurd murmurs as if he was one more frightened boy in the grip of a night terror. He shudders and shudders but seems to hear her, responding to the tone if not the words. The dark lashes flicker, the hard bitten hands relax and eventually she's able to guide him out of the corner. He comes like a child, still asleep, stumbles and whimpers for a mother and a preacher man.

By the barred glow of the storm lantern, she holds the sleeping ghost of a strangely rarefied man, lying on a thin blanket, and listens when he begins to hum a folk melody beneath his broken breath. There are men with guns and dogs hunting him, there are scars around his throat and he limps as only a man lamed by accident not age does. She learns the tune and hums along with him, feels a chill shiver along her arm when his hand spreads starfish innocent on her breast.

When her husband returns the next morning, flushed with beer and cash, he congratulates her for fixing the front door.

 

4.  
He comes in late evening, a tall quiet shape that detaches from the shadows under the trees and comes towards her with a wary grace.

The house is empty, it is only her and the cat streaking past into the night. Without a word, he follows her inside, takes off his torn frayed cap and leaves it on the kitchen table.

She takes him in what was once her marriage bed. Her hair glints in the moonlight with strands of silver and her body is not toned or lithe but he puts his long callused hands on her bare hips and lets her ride him in gasps and groans. The slipslide of their flesh glimmers with sweat and skin, his eyes glimmer rarefied silver blue, bright and wild watchful. He watches her move, touches her loose slackened breasts with careful fingers, touches her where she pulls him inside her. She sees the faint white curl of his scar, the matured heavy lines of his face, and she bends to taste that grim defiant mouth.

He kisses with a latent fury, so much anger and violence leashed to a fierce tenderness. She grinds down harder, takes him deeper. No romance, no novelty, no comfort in this but the raw raging need of flesh and soul consummated.

All is stripped away. It is just woman and man in the cold light of a dead luminous rock.

 

5.  
She never could keep him. He had told her once that he belonged to the world and she'd felt too young to understand, knew only that it sounded awfully cold and cruel. Maybe she understood better as the years went by and her own world expanded. And maybe it was cruel of her to live her own life while he stayed forever on the elusive fringes. 

She had loved and married, bore children and raised them, never any with ice blue eyes. She had worked the orange trees with and after a husband, seen her boys educated better than her, seen them marry and move away.

Now it's just her and the old grey cat sitting under the orange trees, not watching the hills or the sky but resting chin on drawn up knees and looking only at the single light of a lantern on the ground before her.

It will go out and she may never know. No gasp in the dark, no tap on the window, no blood on a blanket, no last shudder in her arms. Maybe there'd be a sentence in a newspaper or a rumour in the general store.

She will never know.


End file.
